Instantly Upgrade Any Prompt Using This 5-Minute Meta-Technique
You can quickly improve any prompt in under 5 minutes by using a meta-prompt technique where you make the AI model reason step-by-step to upgrade your initial messy prompt into an elegant, ready-to-use template.
Summary
- The article introduces the concept of "meta-prompting", which involves making the AI model suggest improvements to your initial prompt. This takes advantage of the model's ability to ask better questions that it gained during fine-tuning.
- Meta-prompting is much faster than writing an expert-level prompt from scratch, as the model does the heavy lifting and you just pick from the "menu" of suggestions.
- A compressed meta-prompt is provided that takes 2-5 minutes and works with models like ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, and HuggingChat. It uses role prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and placeholders.
- 62 variants were tested with criteria like being short, easy to remember, easy to edit, and flexible.
- The meta-prompt technique can also be implemented in code, taking a user's messy input, improving it, and then reinjecting the improved prompt to get a high-quality response. Sample Python code is provided.
- The key mental framework is to build the habit of "just talking to AI" to achieve tasks, whether ranking desserts or analyzing data.
- An extended meta-prompt GPT is available on the GPT store called Bernard that acts as a prompt engineering sensei. An open source HuggingChat version also exists.